Thinking about you
by bhut
Summary: Between S2 and S3. Skye/Daisy Johnson sometimes thinks about Ward when she looks in the mirror. That's ok, because Ward has finally gotten over her, it looks like.


**Thinking about you**

 _Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to Marvel™._

Sometimes Daisy Johnson, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., thinks about Grant Ward. She doesn't do so romantically – she now got Lincoln for that – but in a more down-to-earth manner: what if? What if Ward hadn't been so misguidedly and stubbornly loyal to Hydra? True, it does not matter anymore, but yet...

But yet Daisy Johnson, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., looks in the mirror on occasion, and while she does not dislike whom she is seeing, she does not recognize herself as Skye anymore, either. This is not surprising, she does not recognize herself as a Mary-Sue Poots anymore for an even longer period of time, but she has to admit that Skye had been a good person to be. Daisy Johnson is no slouch either, but she is still no Skye.

Daisy Johnson, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and a gifted individual known as Quake, actually _does not_ blame Grant Ward for the Hydra uprising; that had caught him and John Garrett by surprise, clearly the two of them had been less valued and more unorthodox members of the Nazi death cult in question, but she _does_ blame him for not joining them after; or perhaps 'blame' is not quite the right word. You cannot really blame a person for deciding to choose the other side, and regardless of Grant Ward's entire former obsession with her, he never considered to negotiate to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. – in any capacity. There were few sticky points during his captivity in vault D, perhaps, but otherwise he never appeared to be anything else other than Hydra, and everyone had accepted that, and while they all despised him, (even the 'real' S.H.I.E.L.D. crew, who really did a great job of showing that S.H.I.E.L.D. has its fair share of hypocrites even without Hydra being about), none of them blamed Ward for being loyal – even if it was being loyal to Hydra. Skye had accepted this code of thinking and become Daisy.

That said, Daisy Johnson, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. sometimes cannot help but wonder as to what would have happened if Grant had decided to choose S.H.I.E.L.D., rather than Hydra. Odds are, he would have remained something of a specialist agent for S.H.I.E.L.D., which means that at least _some_ of former Skye's duties, such as shooting Donnie Gill, would have been delegated to him instead, and Daisy might have stayed Skye for a longer period of time...but perhaps it is just a dream, who knows? S.H.I.E.L.D. has a good thing going, but it does have its own flaws, especially after the fracas with the so-called real S.H.I.E.L.D.; but they are not who Daisy Johnson is sore at – not at the moment: rather, it is agent Melinda May.

Daisy Johnson isn't as naive as Skye used to be; she does realize that the Cavalry is sore at her for coming on top back in Li Shi due to her powers, but Daisy also feels that she had paid up for this, and made up for this, when she had helped Coulson and the others stop Jiayling and her merry crew of InHuman pirates. May should have accepted it with some grace – instead she shrugged Daisy's apology off and left S.H.I.E.L.D. It's a temporary leave of absence, Coulson tells her, but Daisy knows him well enough to see that he doesn't believe this himself – not wholeheartedly at least.

Of course, Melinda May didn't leave S.H.I.E.L.D. to join Hydra, 'cause otherwise they're all doomed: between her own skills and those of Ward, the entire S.H.I.E.L.D. can be dead within 24 slash 48 hours, and Daisy Johnson doesn't really have a problem with her surrogate mother figure getting a life outside of S.H.I.E.L.D., but Melinda could call every once in a while; surely between herself, Coulson and Fitz (or Mack – Fitz isn't handling Simmons' sudden new disappearance very well), they could come up with a secure means of communication between her and them – but she doesn't. She may have said that she did not have a problem with Skye (or rather Daisy) defeating her in Li Shi, and she did not have a problem with Coulson (in regards to other matters), but before Daisy had been Skye the Hacktivist, she had been Mary-Sue the orphan, whose knowledge of prolonged silences indicates otherwise. May may not have rejected S.H.I.E.L.D. as Ward had, but her withdrawal is not much of an improvement either.

So what is the point? Daisy Johnson, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. cannot help but wonder, as she looks at herself in a mirror. The point, her reflection tells her (just not literally, if it did – Daisy would go to med bay for a consultation instead), is that Daisy Johnson is no longer Skye, but is rather someone else, someone who is perhaps more like Grant Ward, S.H.I.E.L.D. version, and Daisy isn't sure that this is an improvement over Skye. She knows that on a certain level Grant Ward is most certainly done with S.H.I.E.L.D. and gone from it, laying low for the moment – but she does not care. Perhaps, with her newly mastered powers of vibration, the next time she'll meet him, she'll be able to get the better of him to the point where she'll shake him and ask flat on if staying loyal to Hydra over S.H.I.E.L.D., over the team back on the Bus had been worth it – and then, if circumstances will allow it, she'll offer him a new life via T.A.H.I.T.I., because between her and her new team of powered people how much trouble can Hydra be?..

/

Sometimes Grant Ward has dreams.

In those dreams, he is fighting alongside Daisy Johnson or Skye in the name of S.H.I.E.L.D. – sometimes literally, sometimes on the more generic terms. It hurts. The time spent in S.H.I.E.L.D., the time spent on the Bus – it was some of the best times in his life – he honestly admits it, and the pain of his loss – what he found and lost there – it just sits there, beneath his skin, like an itch that he doesn't quite can get rid of – and doesn't really want to lose.

 _Feelings are a weakness!_ John Garrett, his SO, had once told him, and he was not really wrong: Grant has literal scars to prove it. But John was not really right either: the feelings are tricky, but if you have enough time, you can figure out what you got and where you should put it upon the priority scale. Grant Ward may have once had feelings for Skye – but Skye really cared about the fiction that he had presented to her, Coulson and the others – and now Grant Ward got new scars to prove it. Human relationships are more complex than John had ever explained to him, but one thing is for sure: you cannot have them based on a lie. Grant Ward went onto the Bus pretending to be someone else – and that someone else, that lie, just didn't die: Grant's fellow crew members (not really, but let's call them that for simplicity's sake) really believed in the lie, so that when Ward did reveal the truth to them, they didn't believe it, not for a while – and so they got hurt.

So did Ward, on the other hand, and that didn't make things square between him and them, not by the long shot – and consequently Grant is left wondering, what was their point? The entire Vault D shot – it was excessively reminiscent of what _John_ did to him, how he tore Ward down and built him up in his own image – and perhaps Coulson had tried to do something like that himself.

...Or perhaps Ward is being unfair. He may not have been loyal to Hydra, but he had been loyal to Garrett – not to S.H.I.E.L.D., and Coulson had given him an appropriate treatment instead. Ward does not care. He honestly had planned to settle down with Kara Lynn back in Mexico – and Coulson promptly arrived, clearly intent on dragging Ward back into S.H.I.E.L.D. business, in exchange for T.A.H.I.T.I., of all things. So far, only Obama was able to pull of this sort of gall, and this is why he is the president of the United States, and not Coulson.

Ward has no problem admitting that Kara Lynn's demise, ultimately, rests at _his_ feet, but he does not care. S.H.I.E.L.D. does not care either – it is obvious now, if Ward tries to do anything that is not S.H.I.E.L.D.-related or approved, S.H.I.E.L.D. will swoop in and kill him, or brainwash him, or really just do something that is truly opposite of the concept of 'leave me alone'.

Grant Ward is _very_ good at killing people. Dealing with an entire organization – say, S.H.I.E.L.D., however diminished it might have become – is something else. And besides, Grant Ward is, lately, into _not_ killing people, and he feels that he might be better at this than one would expect from him. Grant Ward does not really want S.H.I.E.L.D. to be destroyed; but he needs friends and allies, and he reckons that he can find them among the remnants of Hydra.

Grant Ward has no intention of _leading_ Hydra, thank you very much – between Garrett, and Whitehall, and List he has a very clear picture of what Hydra was (and is, contrary to what Coulson and his people are thinking – Hydra isn't gone, not at all), and he wants no part of it. It would make Kara's death an even bigger mockery than how it already is – and Ward has no intention of doing that...

Skye...it is strange, really – there was a time, once, when he thought only about her, and now? That time is gone. Nowadays, he thinks about her, or rather – about "Daisy Johnson" – only when it is necessary, no more. She is one of S.H.I.E.L.D. best and strongest fighters, combining both an alien gift and a human skill when dealing with enemies, allies, strangers – but her skills come both from him (this goes without saying) and from Cavalry – and Ward had plans to deal with Cavalry, (before he forgave her, alongside Coulson, for Kara Lynn's sake – and then Coulson brought Deathlok, and that idea flew out of the window, pushed out of it by Ward's own idiocy and arrogance), and nowadays he intends to utilize this knowledge...not so much against the Cavalry (which is also ironic in a strange way), but against Skye/Daisy and her crew. His strategy is far from the best, his plans are not yet complete, but he already got the basic outline of the plot – and so he knows where'll he go from here: he is going to get closure for Kara Lynn (Morse and the rest of her camarilla from the so-called 'real' S.H.I.E.L.D. are going to be squashed like the lice they are), he's going to get some closure for himself (and Coulson isn't going to enjoy this – not one little bit), and then? Who knows?

Maybe when he finally faces his afterlife, Kara Lynn Palamas will be waiting for him – who knows?


End file.
